Social, Marketing & Communication Media to Drive Your Business

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Archive for
October, 2009

Here I will help you understand what makes a web page perform well in Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. I’m considering linking rather than page structure and content, I will do that another time, for now we’ll assume that you have a search engine friendly website full of pages with interesting content about what you […]

Here I will help you understand what makes a web page perform well in Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. I’m considering linking rather than page structure and content, I will do that another time, for now we’ll assume that you have a search engine friendly website full of pages with interesting content about what you do.

Like me you probably use search engines in two ways. Your either searching for a product or service for yourself or you’re wanting people to find you when they are searching for a product or service that you provide. The search engine, for its part, wants to keep everybody happy by responding with relevant and useful information. Of course for every subject there will be thousands or millions of pages, so to determine which are the most relevant the search engine analyses each and gives ‘brownie points’ or pagerank according to all the positive elements it finds. When asked the search question it then presents those pages in descending order.

So ‘brownie points’ for our pages is what we’re looking for and a primary source of these are backlinks or links to your page from another page. Sources of these can be directory listings, forums, links from other web pages and published articles but vary considerably in the value (number of points) they give to your page. Consequently it is a useful exercise to understand how this process works so that you can intelligently apply the time you spend building links according to their value.

Let us take a look at how search engines assess your page. Taking Google as an example when it analyses a page the first thing it will do is search for links to that page in its index, links on pages outside of the index will not be seen and therefore will not count. Secondly, having found pages, it will look at the overall site pagerank (0-9, the BBC have a 9) then analyses them for local rank, that is, do they contain key words or phrases that are also contained in your page and the targeted search phrase.

Imagine someone gives you a bag of ‘pick n mix’ at the cinema, you like big sweets (pr 9s), strawberry flavour and jellies; so you go through bag picking all the strawberry flavoured sweets and all the jellies but the very best are the big strawberry jellies.

Ok so all our links will be big strawberry jellies – ideal maybe but tough, because likely these pages will be your competitors and they are not likely to provide you with links; and if you do get a link on the BBC site let me know how! But we can improvise our way round these problems by writing our own pages containing the keywords we seek and post them out to other sites with good page rank that will be in Googles index. And don’t forget, using my analogy, you will still be munching the other sweets in the bag. Lesser links whilst not favourites still add value such as directories and social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

To summarise, think about the key phrases you want to be found by and the relevance of the links you seek; manage your time between building easy links which can be done quickly, such as directories and social media, but don’t add huge value; and writing article submissions, building a blog, posting to forums and engaging in social media which do take time but provide high value.

Plan and execute your strategy carefully and be patient, Google aren’t known for speedy responses, and you will be rewarded with highly ranked pages which lead to more traffic and more business.

Today most companies and SMEs have a website. Often start up businesses develop their website before they find an accountant or finalise their business plan. However once the site is up and running and despite all the current hype about search engines, social media and mobile communications, often the poor old website is then left […]

Today most companies and SMEs have a website. Often start up businesses develop their website before they find an accountant or finalise their business plan. However once the site is up and running and despite all the current hype about search engines, social media and mobile communications, often the poor old website is then left completely to its own devices.

This is not unreasonable, many SMEs have their work cut out managing the day to day running of their business and actually getting the work done that pays the bills; and the processes involved in measuring the performance of a website historically have not been exactly user friendly.

Nevertheless consistent marketing of your business is key, especially in difficult market conditions and your online presence is one of the most important tools in communicating to potential customers. So it is important to get the very best return on the time and money invested in it.

Now Applause has an answer to the problem; we are offering a free visual website profile that will give you a simple visual analysis of how your website is performing and how it measures against those of your competitors. It will also tell you what you need to do to outrank the competition and you can opt to receive a monthly update showing how improvements are affecting the profile on an ongoing basis.

Our FREE profiler presents the following information in a simple and easy to understand graphical format : 1. Three key tasks you can complete to improve web performance; 2. Your google page rank for your top ten chosen key words you would like to be found by; 3. your ten nearest competitor websites (very useful for subsequent analysis).

We can also provide an in depth analysis report which provides the following information:

Once you have embarked on social media networking one of the hardest things in the beginning is building your network because at the start you don’t know anyone. Networking to your existing clients and colleagues gets you going but what you really want is to find new people, who you may have something in common […]

Once you have embarked on social media networking one of the hardest things in the beginning is building your network because at the start you don’t know anyone. Networking to your existing clients and colleagues gets you going but what you really want is to find new people, who you may have something in common with, be able to give or share information and ultimately who may help you find new business.

Perhaps you have already acquired a Linked In, Facebook, or Twitter account or more recently signed up for Google Plus, established your profile and put up a photo of yourself or business logo. Do remember that people will use this ‘Avatar’, as they are known, and your username (my Twitter ID is instantApplause) to find you and get an idea of who you are and what you do. A social media software page is a crowded place, rather like meeting someone at a station where you wear something brightly coloured, you need to be visible to be instantly recognised. A similar amount of effort needs to go into designing your identity as your business card or brochure. Many social networkers change their ID monthly, I think it is a mistake. Successful companies rarely change their identity and you shouldn’t either.

You may also have fed your email address list into the social media software application to see if anyone you have emailed has a profile; and signed up for some groups that you feel are relevant to your business. All of these techniques will build your network and set you on your way but in some instances can be very time consuming.

Here is a method that you may not have considered which involves querying Google with some structured search requests aimed at the specific networking software you use. The idea is that every profile page contained on the web will have key interests listed. Say for instance you run a small business selling rare formula 1 posters and catalogues, by searching for ‘Formula 1′ you will pick up anyone who lists Formula 1 in their profile. You can locate people who may have an interest in your business that you would not easily be able to find in any other way.

Of course having found this information you will need to consider how you might introduce yourself. You need to avoid being regarded just as a spammer and rejected, and in many applications there are penalties for this. LinkedIn for instance will terminate your account of you persistently have people returning ‘I Don’t Know This Person’ in response to your introductions. Perhaps in this example offer some free historical information or a list of rare posters you have to offer – just use your imagination to come up with an approach that will attract the person you want to connect with. At the end of the day everyone registered with a networking facility is looking to expand their network, gain new information and connect with people. Provided your approach is honest, respectful and does not amount to 500 words of ‘buy from me buy from me’ people will respond to you.

Finally remember this; although it may seem daunting at first and progress creepingly slow it does gather pace exponentially. As your network grows the faster it will expand, connect to us if you like using the links that follow, we’re always happy to network.